Early in the development of modern networking equipment such as routers, switches, and the like it was realized that at times a particular piece of network equipment might hang or crash. In such instances, a human operator often had to intervene by traveling to the location of the equipment and rebooting or power cycling the equipment in order to get that particular piece of equipment working.
Responding to these needs, the inventor of the present invention, as early as 1994, constructed a “power cycle box.” The original design contained two network ports and a control relay connected to at least one power outlet. From the exterior, the supply arranged two network socket connections and a power outlet socket on the same surface of the power supply (the front or the top), and in some instances included an indicator light. A diagram of such a design is shown in FIG. 1. In this design, a particular network signal could be sent through the two network ports which would cause the control relay to disconnect the power supply from the power outlet, thereby, shutting off power to the controlled network device. Another signal would reestablish power, thereby, causing the controlled device to reboot. An alternative design arranged more than one controlled power supply socket with corresponding network sockets on a surface of the power supply. Typically, in this earlier design, some network signal had to be present through the connectors for the power outlets to be on.